T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

“You’ve got beautiful skin,” he said. “Stay out of the sun and you won’t need anything major for fifteen, twenty years.”

“I was just wondering,” she said to the secretary, feeling bright now, hopeful, “Dr. Mellors’ wife — did he work on her? I mean, the kind of procedure we’re talking about for me?” She pushed her credit card across the counter. “It’s no big deal, I was just wondering if he would, you know, on his own wife …?”

The secretary — Maggie, her nametag read — was in her thirties, or maybe forties, it was hard to say. She’d put her hair up in a bun and she wore a low-cut blouse over a pair of suspiciously full breasts, but then she was an advertisement, wasn’t she? Her smile — the complicitous sunny smile that had beamed out continuously to this point — faded suddenly. The eyes — too round, too tight at the corners — dodged away. “I wouldn’t know,” she said. “He got a divorce five years ago and I’ve only been here three. But I don’t see why not.”

……

The procedure — the injection of the botulin toxin under the skin between her eyes and then creeping on up to her hairline, one needle prick after another — hurt more than she thought it would. He numbed the area first with a packet of ice, but the ice gave her an instant headache and still she felt the sting of the needle. On the second or third prick she must have flinched. “Are you comfortable?” he asked, inches from her, his pale gray eyes probing hers, and she said, “Yes,” and tried to nod, but that only made it worse. “I guess I don’t handle pain well.” She tried to compose herself, tried to keep it light, because she wasn’t a whiner — that wasn’t her image of herself. Not at all. “Too sensitive, I guess,” she said, and she meant it as a joke.

The purpose of the toxin, as he’d explained to her in his sacerdotal tones, was to paralyze the muscles between her eyes and the ones that lifted her brow too, so that when she squinted in the bright sun or frowned over her checkbook, the skin wouldn’t crease — it wouldn’t move at all. She could be angry, raging, as furious as she’d ever been in her life, and certainly her body language would show that — her mouth, her eyes — but her brow would remain as smooth and untroubled as if she were asleep and dreaming of a boat drifting across a placid lake. Of course, the effect would last an average of three months or so and then she’d have to undergo the procedure all over again. And he had to warn her that a small percentage of patients reported side effects — headaches, nausea, that sort of thing. A very small percentage, negligible really. This was the safest thing in the world — in the right hands, that is. These Botox parties she’d read about? Not a good idea.

Now he took her hand to lift it to her forehead and the patch of gauze she was to hold there, just till the pinpricks closed up. “There,”

he was saying, “that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

Lying back in the chair, staring into his eyes, she felt something give way inside her, the thin tissue of susceptibility, of surrender: she was in his hands now. This was his domain, this darkened room with its examining chair, the framed degrees on the wall, the glint of polished metal. How old was he? she wondered. She couldn’t say, and she realized with a jolt that he wore the same expression as the nurse and the secretary, that his brow was immobile and his eyes rounded as if they’d been shaped out of dough. Forty, she guessed.

Forty-five, maybe. But he had a spread to his shoulders — and those hands. His hands were like electric blankets on a cold night in a cabin deep in the woods. “No,” she lied. “No, not bad at all.”

“All right, good,” he said, rising from the chair though he hadn’t shifted his gaze from her. “Any problems, you call me right away, day or night, okay?” He drifted to the table in the corner and came back with a card imprinted with his name, the number of the office and an after-hours number. “And let’s get a date set up for that blepharoplasty — we’ll plan it around your schedule.”

She was about to get up too, but before she could move he reached forward to take the pad of gauze from her and she saw that it was flecked with minuscule spots of blood. “Here,” he said, handing her a mirror. “You see, there’s nothing there — if you want, you can cover up with a dab of makeup. And you should expect results within a day or two.”

“Wonderful,” she said, giving him a smile. In the background — and she’d been faintly aware of it all along, even through her minor assault of nerves — a familiar piano piece was sifting through speakers hidden somewhere in the walls, as orderly and precise as the beating of a young heart. Bach. The partitas for keyboard, and she could hear the pianist — what was his name?

— humming over them. She rose and stood there a moment in the still, shadowy room with the bright light focused on the chair in the middle of the floor, absorbing the music as if she’d just awakened to it. “Do you like classical music?” she murmured.

He gave her a smile. “Yes, sure.”

“Bach?”

“Is that what this is? I never know — it’s the music service. But they’re good and I think it helps the patients relax — soothing, you know? Hey, better than heavy metal, right?”

She made a leap here, and everything to come was the result of it, as inevitable and indisputable as if she’d planned it all out beforehand: “The reason I ask is because I have two tickets for Saturday night — at the Music

Academy? It’s an all-Bach program, and”—she lifted her eyebrows, she could still do that—“my girlfriend just told me this morning she can’t make it. She was — she had to go out of town unexpectedly — and I was wondering: would you like to go?”

After the concert — he’d begged off, said he’d love to go but had to check with Maggie, the secretary, to see if he was free, and then he wasn’t — she went into Andalusia, a restaurant she liked because it had a good feel and a long bar where people gathered to have tapas and drinks while a guitarist worked his way through the flamenco catalogue in a nook by the fireplace. She knew people here — the bartender, Enrique, especially — and she didn’t feel out of place coming in alone. Or she did, but not to the extent she felt elsewhere.

Enrique took care of her, made sure nobody crowded her. He was protective, maybe a little obsessive even, and if he had a thing for her, well, she could use that to her advantage. A little mutual flirtation, that was all, but she wasn’t seriously looking — or she hadn’t been, not since she’d got her divorce. She had a house, money in the bank, the freedom to eat when and where she liked, to travel, make her own schedule, and she was enjoying it, that was what she kept telling herself.

She was having ceviche and a salad, sipping a glass of Chilean red and looking through the local newspaper — she couldn’t resist the Personals: they were so tacky, so dishonest and nakedly self-serving, and how pathetic could people be? — when she felt a tap at her shoulder and there he was, Dr. Mellors, in a pale gold sportcoat and a black silk shirt open at the collar. “Hello,” he said, “or should I say buenas noches,” and there was nothing even faintly medicinal in his tone.

“Oh, hi,” she said, taken by surprise. Here he was, looming over her again, and though she’d been thinking of him all through the concert, trying to fit him into the empty seat beside her, for one flustered second she couldn’t summon his name. “How are you?”

He just smiled in answer. A beat went by, Enrique giving her a sidelong glance from the near end of the bar. “You look terrific,” he said finally. “All dressed up, huh?”